The folks who want to ban direct corporate contributions from D.C. political races say they did, in fact, gather the required numbers of signatures to get their initiative on November's ballot and the Board of Elections can't count.
Earlier this month, the BOE ruled that the anti-corporate giving folks, known as D.C. Public Trust, were 1,726 [...]

Program for troubled youth doesn't do much but waste city funds, investigation finds. [WJLA]
Mayor Vince Gray's biggest regret? Not playing professional baseball [Post]
Did OCF ignore clues that HTJ was a crook? [Examiner]

LL needs help nicknaming the group of like-minded politicos who seem to be taking turns running unsuccessfully (so far) for office. The gang includes Sekou Biddle, David Grosso, Pat Mara, and Bryan Weaver.
Leave your suggestions in the comments. LL reserves the right to ignore them all.
Photos by Darrow Montgomery

This morning, the Examiner reported on the salaries of D.C. Council staffers and members. The paper especially focused on staffers earning more than $100,000, which the Examiner says is one in five employees of the council. The highlights of their findings:

LL has a hard time reconciling how Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley thinks he has a chance of being president in 2016 when one of his biggest accomplishments as governor could be opening some sure-to-be gaudy Las Vegas-style casino in Prince George's County. But hey, that's not LL's beat.
But the D.C. Lottery, which the feds are [...]

Wasted work day at the Wilson Building as staffers will spend much of the day comparing salaries [Examiner]
Jack Evans pays his staff the most; Jim Graham the least. [Examiner]
DCPS after-school programs to ask citizenship status for data gathering purposes only. [Post]

While LL was away, the city's Office of Inspector General struck again.
The IG released a report on its investigation into allegations of cheating on standardized tests at D.C. public schools. The office began its investigation more than a year ago after a lengthy piece by USA Today in March 2011 questioned why so many tests [...]

Fourteen years ago, Marie Drissel was looking for a savior.
Marion Barry was limping to the end of his fourth term as mayor and the city wasn’t just broke, but broken. A federally imposed control board was the de facto city ruler, put in place because Congress didn’t trust the city to manage its own budget. [...]